Microsoft Acquires Conversational AI, Bot Development Business Xoxco

Microsoft has Declared for a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and bot development company Xoxco for an undisclosed Amount.

Texas-based Xoxco has been paving the way in conversational AI since 2013 and was responsible for the production of Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack which helps schedule meetings.

“It also developed Botkit that provides the development tools used by thousands and thousands of programmers on GitHub. Over the years, we have partnered with Xoxco and have been inspired by this work,” stated Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI in Microsoft on Thursday.

Conversational AI is quickly turning into a way in which companies engage with employees and clients — from creating virtual assistants and simplifying customer interactions to utilizing conversational assistants to help employees communicate and work together.

According to Gartner,”by 2020, conversational artificial brains will probably be a supported user experience for over 50 percent of large, consumer-centric ventures”.

“With this acquisition, we are continuing to realise our approach of democratising AI development, conversation and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where folks communicate,” said Cheng.

Within the last six months, Microsoft has made several strategic acquisitions to quicken the speed of AI growth.

The purchase of Semantic Machines in May brought a revolutionary new strategy to conversational AI.

Back in July, it obtained Bonsai to help lessen the obstacles to AI development by blending machine instruction, reinforcement learning and simulation.

In September, Microsoft acquired Lobe, a company that has made a straightforward visual interface enabling everyone to develop and apply deep learning and AI versions immediately, without writing code.

“The acquisition of GitHub in October shows our belief in the power of communities to help fuel the next wave of bot growth,” Microsoft explained.